May: update on equipment.data

Just the other day, we hit our first target for equipment.data. There are now 51 institutions contributing more than 13 thousand pieces of equipment to the national portal. Well done to all of you and a big welcome on board to the latest University Alliance contributors! We are looking forward to working with a few more of you to set up sharing your equipment in the next couple of months.

Developments

On the development side, we are working on 3 key things at the moment:

Better search: our developers are working on a better search for equipment.data; we are employing a few different options – building an ontology based on text mining, improve the browsing experience by enabling filters on a variety of fields, using elastic search. If you are interested and would like to test our staging site, get in touch and we will share the link.

Partnering with booking systems: so far we have been integrating with institutional databases and current research information systems. We have noticed a trend of increased usage of booking systems so we have been working with them to set up direct feeds to equipment.data and help institutions comply with research funder requirements. Here’s my recent review of 5 booking systems that operate in the UK.

We are developing metrics to evidence usage and sharing of research equipment. We are also thinking about the best way to aggregate and report this information. If you are interested in joining this conversation and driving this agenda, let us know your thoughts here.